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117

Snap Shot

2009-08-28

I love to look at pictures from trips. In fact I even enjoy slide shows.
I even enjoy slide shows of people I do not even know. If the picture is
worth a thousand words then the slide show is worth a couple of million.

I think my addiction to the slide show came from going to church all the
time as a boy. Every now and then someone would be visiting the church and
instead of having to listen to a sermon, we got to look at slides. Who wouldn’t
gain a fondness for slideshows?

We recently had a small gathering at Jon and Laura’s to look at pictures
from the summer. Since we were all on different legs of the same trip (to
Colorado), the pictures had a good deal of redundancy. Yet, the photos were
still somewhat different, because they were taken by a different photographer.
We all saw the same things but from different viewpoints. For example, I
would take a picture of a great looking route on a mountain, and my friend
Ray would take a picture of the good looking girl climbing the mountain -
forget the route.

We relived the summer trip by seeing the slides. The one problem was that
we did not take enough pictures. I love looking at the pictures when I am
at home, but I hate to take them. Well, that’s not entirely true. My hiking
style does not lend itself to picture taking. I actually hate to stop walking,
therefore I don’t like to take pictures. But to go one step further,
I really don’t want my partner to take pictures either, because it
slows them down and that slows me down. So, we end up with a lot of pictures
of the summits where we would break for a couple of minutes and have time
for photos. Other picture taking would be sporadic at best, the object just
had to catch our eye. Even then we would never stop to take a picture on
the climb, only on the descent.

Then when we get home I am always surprised to see that I hardly took any
pictures. When I was climbing it seemed like we took thousands. Of course
there is the summit shots we took. They all look the same. We should have
stopped and taken more pictures. But then again, maybe some of those summit
snap shots would not have been taken if we had stopped below to snap a few.